Gawker didn’t learn their lesson and tried to appeal but was shut down today. Peter Thiel came out as the financial backer to help Hulk Hogan take down Gawker. So who is this beautiful beautiful man that stood up against the Goliath?

Peter Thiel is son of two West Germans, he moved to the United States in 1977[1]. He studied philosophy in College and eventually did his law degree. An devoted libertarian, Thiel founded many private enterprises including Paypal (who he no longer involved and evidently it became infected with fascism), Clarium Capital and Founder’s Found. He also invested in Facebook in which he’s also a board member. With his own successful, he started many philanthropic organisations to help advance freedom such as Thiel Foundation, OpenAI, Seasteading Institute and Thiel Fellowship.

As with the financial backing to punish unethical journalism, Thiel stated:

I didn’t really want to do anything … I thought it would do more harm to me than good. One of my friends convinced me that if I didn’t do something, nobody would.

Thiel was previously outed by Gawker, he has this response:

I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest…

On helping people, he said:

I can defend myself. Most of the people they attack are not people in my category. They usually attack less prominent, far less wealthy people that simply can’t defend themselves, even someone like Terry Bollea who is a millionaire and famous and a successful person didn’t quite have the resources to do this alone.”

While Thiel is not an objectivist, he certainly does seem like the Hank Rearden Rand would have cast in a modern day adaptation. It reminds me a lot of Rearden’s trial, Rearden didn’t give up, neither did Theil. Despite all the bullying, both Rearden and Thiel survived to fight back. It takes doesn’t matter where you are, if you can stand on your principle, you can succeed.

There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.- Peter Thiel